Give me a sphere with hair

My quest began with a case of hives. Thanksgiving night, I awoke with raised, itchy red areas splashed across my body and ferocious itchiness on the soles of my feet. Okay, whatever. Something I ate nailed me – yes, I know the likely culprit. I got up, popped an antihistamine, and got out an ice pack. No biggie, except for the fact that I knew I’d be wasted the next morning and I’d probably have to beg off walking the dogs, which isn’t fair to my husband.

Sure enough, the next day I was doing a good imitation of a character from Walking Dead. I lurched over to my computer, gagged down some coffee, and poked at links on YouTube. Maybe a music video would bring me back to life.

One link was labeled “Anthony Kiedis farts and everyone runs away (funny!)” I clicked on it. It had a promising beginning, with John Frusciante clutching a carton of milk while indulging in a vigorous round of pocket pool. Soon Anthony Kiedis grinned, said “look out, look out,” and began windmilling his arms, presumably so his intestinal joy could be shared with everyone. Frusciante and another guy evacuated. Flea, focused on generating horrible noises with a keyboard, ignored the whole thing.

Meh. It wasn’t really side-splitting but it was alright, I guess. I’ve witnessed similar savagery when boys get together at my house, with guys pointing their posteriors at each other and making sounds reminiscent of a howitzer or a duck being stepped on. On one notable occasion, the action resulted in a door being ripped off its hinges. I ended up showing a couple of boys how to reinforce screw holes with wood glue and toothpicks.

I was vaguely ashamed of myself for watching the video, though. The fact is, if you follow most people around long enough, they’re bound to do something odd or embarrassing. Most of us are just lucky that onlookers don’t have a camera so such moments aren’t recorded. Shouldn’t I be using my time a little better? For example, maybe I could tackle the problem of making fur in a 3D program, which hasn’t gone so well the last few times I’ve tried it?

That’s the thing with some of the tools I use. Many are developed by people who have a neat idea they’re pursuing, out of the goodness of their hearts or in the hope of piecing together an income. Maybe they have a background in software development and testing; maybe they don’t. Even if the application isn’t crawling with bugs like the underside of a rock, documentation can be uneven, the likes of a fellow mumbling through a video on YouTube or popping up to address users’ anguished pleas on some obscure forum. Did he just poke a button or not? What does the button with three tiny squares on it do compared to the button with four tiny squares?

Even tools sold by companies that have a reputable facade can be uneven: Say, that upgrade looks great! What the — what happened to all my custom presets? They just disappeared! What? To fix it, I have to move around some invisible files in an obscure directory? Am I going to need to dip into Unix? Fine. Fine. I’ll just have a cup of coffee and browse through commercially available 3D models while I think this through. Say, that’s an awesome model of a tarantula. And it’s on sale for forty cents and it comes with presets to grow hair! Where do I sign up? Take my forty cents, suckers! Oh yeah. Just let me download this baby and I’ll do some wicked things with it. What the … how do I make the hair grow? Did I just pay forty cents for a model of a bald spider? Argh!

What most of us want is smooth workflow, so when we set out to do something we can. When I’m in the midst of a project, I don’t want a big troubleshooting orgy. I want to know how to grow fur on my 3D tarantula and I want to know how to simulate fluids so it can ooze drool or spider juice or whatever the heck it is spiders do. 

That means that every once in awhile, I have to sit down, fiddle around, and take some notes.

The last time I messed with growing fur or fibers was in Blender. The results were comically awful.

I’d like to think it went a little better this time. I started out by growing hair from a sphere. (Hey, you never can tell when you’ll need a hairy sphere.) I only crashed the program six or ten times before reaching this point, which is about par.

Another experiment, this time growing fur from a model of a squirrel. It turned out that when I changed the squirrel’s pose after creating the fur, the fur didn’t follow the pose. That’s one of those things whose cause isn’t necessarily obvious the first time you run across it, then becomes clear.

I thought the image was amusing, though. It looks like the squirrel is having an out-of-body experience, or maybe doing something vulgar with its fur. Sometimes mistakes are fun.

This one shows fur grown on commercially available model of a wolf. I had to try this because I saw a bunch of pitiful forum posts on the topic. It worked out okay. (Except for the fact that if I look at the upper lefthand corner of the picture, the cloud texture is mirrored, which makes it clear that the whole picture is synthetic.)

No, I don’t know why the wolf has a rubber squeak bone. I just make the pictures; I don’t always understand them. Maybe the wolf got bored. Maybe it wanted to take something home to its pups. 

Regardless, many thanks to Anthony Kiedis’ intestinal rumblings for inspiring me to learn something new.

Another experiment, albeit unrelated to growing fur: making tattoos.

What’s that? The picture is too small to tell what the card looks like? I’ll complain to the management for you. Oh – that’s me.

It’s Christmas card time again. I make my own cards every year, even though it would be more sensible to go to the dollar store, fork over a couple of bucks, and send out a set of bland images of puppies wearing Santa hats.

This year’s card has a Santa on it. It’s one of those design-by-committee, bang-it-together in a weekend things. I grab everyone in the house, plop them down at the dining table, and glare at them until ideas come out. This year, all of my own concepts were influenced by current events and were pretty dark. My husband finally rolled his eyes and said “Santa is on a beach. His sleigh is up on blocks and he’s put a for sale sign on it.”

Fine. I could work with that. I decided that Santa was kind of a Viking surfer/biker dude under that suit, and one of the things he really needed was a full sleeve tattoo. That meant I had to do research by looking at numerous photos of shirtless, tattooed men, which was a great hardship.

I fell in love with a norse dragon tattoo from Sacred Knot. Wouldn’t something like that – exactly like that! – look great on Santa? Yeah. Unfortunately, that design belongs to them, not me, which meant I had to go draw my own.

I’d never drawn a tattoo before. Most of my drawings were awful. I comforted myself with the knowledge that on the printed card, the tattoo would only be an inch across. Also, many real-life tattoos are awful, a hodgepodge of miscellanea acquired over time rather than a cohesive design created by a tattoo artist. If the tattoo I made was ugly, I’d simply tell people that Santa got it as a bet when he was drunk. Long nights at the north pole, boredom, some elf tossing, an excess of mead … it could happen.

After some unsuccessful fiddling around with pencils and a light box, I sat down with my iPad, an Apple Pencil, and a copy of Procreate. My husband put something on the television, maybe Forever, and began waxing philosophical about the program being a metaphor for marriage. I filled a glass with spiked eggnog, grunted at his comments at the appropriate times, and opened a picture of my Santa’s chest and arm on a layer in Procreate. I began to draw, a process complicated by the fact that several glasses of eggnog had made my eyes cross and my body grow floppy. I drew a reindeer, a Vegvisir in case Santa got lost, and for good measure I threw in some random knotwork and Nordic patterns. Soon I had a design, although I couldn’t tell whether it was any good – nor did I care.

“Whaddaya think?” I grunted at my husband, holding out my iPad for inspection.

“It’s fine,” he said, not bothering to look at it.

I exported the tattoo layer as a PNG, sent it to my desktop machine, and once I was sober enough to lurch to my computer, I layered it on my Santa scene in Photoshop. “Procreate and an Apple pencil,” I crowed, “easiest drawing process ever!” Or maybe I belched and moaned about how I’d drunk too damned much eggnog. I can’t remember.

The texture on Santa’s trunks was inspired by men’s garish floral board shorts, particularly the ones plastered with hibiscus. I reasoned that Santa would wear something similar, only in a pointsettia pattern. After running a fabric simulation on the trunks to make them fall just so, I plunked a mystery drink in Santa’s hand. I also ran a fabric simulation on the clothes chucked in the sand behind his chair, so they’d sink down messily.

Details like that are important. I like to think people are subconsciously impressed by the care I put into my work in the split second before they mutter “Eh, there’s no Jesus on this card” and chuck it in the trash.

Ho ho ho.

Leave a Reply